Shielded Engagement: Danny Hayward’s ‘Two Essays’

Edmund Hardy

‘Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one
jewel left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness,’ wrote John Milton in Areopagitica. How then is an essence
changed? Hayward begins with the recognition of ‘class fantasies’. A consciousness which reflects on its fantasies as socially and historically
refracted begins to follow otherwise denied possibilities for living and
organising. Hayward then applies the idea to a close
reading of Keats. Consciousness has an essence and it can be changed by
reflection, and by working towards the conditions by which a ‘break’ into
reflection can occur. His chosen Keats
poem is ‘When I have fears’ where the line “unreflecting love;- then on the
shore” presents just such a break. The semi-colon and dash bring the cycle of
fantasy to an end – primarily the bourgeois fantasy of transcendence. Certain
lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude
similarly move over the line of reflection – to choose just one example: “my
brain / worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being” (1799,
i.120-2). If the essence of consciousness is not reached, and is not open to
revision, then stasis occurs, and there is no dialectic and only a faulty
ethics based on illusions: “and for us, now, this might be the more important moment of the dialectic.”

Hayward attempts to
clear away other accounts of consciousness and ideology, in particular Žižek’s idea of fantasies as a part of
objective reality: “I think that committing to a theory that just assumes the perfected impoverishment of
consciousness is a gross abdication of critical vigilance.” Why? “[B]ecause the renunciation of consciousness as a field of contest
involves the renunciation of the full scale of the experience of the dynamics
of fantasised pleasure... across the turbulent fields of collective human
practice”. Those turbulent fields are problematic in that we can’t certainly distinguish universal from contingent
elements. Without recourse to a problematic structural view, Hayward’s ‘class fantasies’ only go so
far down into the formative routines of human life before they lose explanatory
power in the face of looser and more singular contexts. These appear and make
the obliteration of particular desires only partial. Hayward’s
singular-universal example: You
find yourself outside an apartment on a wet street in the early evening,
looking up at a lit window, and “what desires do you feel; but also, and in the
current connection more importantly, how can those desires be obliterated and
made anew?” The reference to obliteration pulls away from the open struggle to close the gap between structure-reproducing and structure-challenging
moments of consciousness, that is, between routine and innovation. Closing this gap would
otherwise suggest a gradualist, fragmentary radicalism. Instead a whole
dialectic is impatiently posited, run out and superseded within the question. Hayward
seeks to override the structural problem by presenting a singular-universal
moment which carries a potential for radical change, dividing stasis from
radical newness. With the more fragmentary, anti-structural view restored, this
would map to a dividing of revolutionary
aims: the difference between reshaping social institutions towards a radical
polyarchy (a process in which ideas and practise feed back in a constant
critical process, which again is very different from pessimistic ‘reformist tinkering’
resigned to softening damage it can’t think beyond), and the destruction of
existing institutions as hopelessly contaminated by capitalism.

For Hayward’s argument,
class positions have to become more explicit or more present, as we
can read in the words “at last” at the end of Hayward’s essay on the UK
university struggles between Nov 2010 and July 2011: access to education is “distributed across institutions whose ‘diversity of
missions’ at last promotes nothing besides a diversity of class positions.”
(‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory’, January 2012, Mute Magazine). At a linguistic level, we can see the
implications of a class-based analysis of single-universal contents more
clearly. Vološinov gives an analogous linguistic example to Hayward’s street
and window scenario: “The utterance ‘What time is it?’ has a different meaning
each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a
different theme, depending on the concrete historical situation (“historical”
here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in
essence, it is a part.” (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,
Harvard University Press 1986, p 100.) Vološinov’s theoretical formulation of a
class-based linguistics incorporates an understanding of utterance in a properly
historical dimension – the “extra-verbal” of language which Hayward (in a
footnote to ‘Perfect Capitalism’) castigates Anglo-American philosophers for
failing to canvas. Dialectics within language clearly run as partial
structures; building a Marxist poetics from Vološinov’s linguistics of
historically changing social classes would bring back the fragmentary
revolution of social artefacts revised piecemeal in a wave of continual
difference, as first suggested by Hayward’s example of standing in the street.
What happens to Hayward’s revolutionary ‘obliteration’ when it is placed within
language, or if it is attached to the idea of writing a poem? The second essay
attempts an answer.

‘Perfect Capitalism’ takes us into the moment of obliteration, offering
a critique of reactionary, backward movements. Hayward argues that a poetry
which follows the reactionary movement of capital as its best disciple, moving towards the lyric of “perfect
capitalism”, will in fact send out a “grotesque challenge” to the democratic
economic system at large. For Hayward, this “may be yet” a political function
in language; it is also akin to the idea of constructing a god in God’s image
in order to negate Him and free the world of divinity. The variety of the
reactionary movements which Hayward identifies opens his argument almost to the
point of dissipation: he is imagining a poetry which ”attempts to make
splintered, partial, luddist, stupefied or reactionary politics into something
more than itself.” Thus far, this is a kind of negative capability of poetry –
a stripping of false necessities by pretending to express the false necessity
itself as actually necessary. If capitalism carries the idea of its own
inevitability, the argument runs, let’s write like we believe it to be really
inevitable, and also perfectible (our very hope will be our secret, subverting
the expectation of a Marxist negative image of society worked out in cryptic
detail by a writer secretly despairing of any practical application other than
through the creativity of idealised revolutionary moments). To do this would be “to sing
out as a wish what that system would
wish us to believe; to be, in short, its best and most perfect representative;
and to say in the armor of rapture exactly what it needs.” The armor of rapture
is the final turn by which Hayward leaves any kind of dialectical materialism
behind – I understand it to be a form of secret hope, mentioned above. Hayward
wants a poetry which coils around in social practise, pursuing its perfect
vision of capitalism round and round until it transcends that practise
completely. To desire this
resonant perfection is to “wade towards” the corruption of perfectible
capitalism, and to express the value non-equivalence of these opposites, in
song. Given that money-as-capital is self-reproducing – constantly circulating,
expanding and creating value in an asymmetric form – its perfect image pursued
on paper might at first resolve into a long, mystical description of a ten
pound note.

As such, Hayward is negotiating
a long reversal through the nineteenth century’s multiple splintering between
the senses of moral and market value – the history of literature’s fitful engagement
with vast economic ‘engines’ replete with their own genres of writing, which is
one of the strands of Mary Poovey’s Genres
of the Credit Economy (2008). In
action, such a poetry would try to throw itself into the M-C-M’ process, moving
across the gaps where capital’s potentiality lies, that is, between buying and
selling, selling and paying, speaking to and for ideological contexts – the
“armor of rapture” just needs to be very strong. If money-as-capital could
speak, it would say: Youmust love me above all else, to be worthy of
me. Hayward seems to suggest that poetry can repeat capital’s command, “I
love you”, while embedding this statement with the best and most obliterating
expression of hatred possible. This is based on Hayward’s diagnosis: “Capital
is retrograde, non-progressive; or if it continues to be dialectical then the
dialectic now attains a considerable axial tilt.” This misalignment is
“illuminated” by the materialism of a lyric addressed to capitalism – it is the
asymmetry of the value-form which, in Marx’s account, can never be sublated
because it carries a possibility or potentiality which jumps into the future –
and the result is the credit system. Hayward’s backward-leaping revolutionary Romanticism
recognises this deferral, addressing the axial tilt in order to force its
contradiction in reactionary fervour. Hayward goes on to align two contemporary
works with this exemplary reaction. Both desire “backwardness with a special
hotness and singularity”: Kevin Davies’ The
Golden Age of Paraphernalia and Justin Katko’s Rhyme Against the Internet. Katko’s formal patterns carry their theme
against ‘the internet’ – a target so diffuse that it begins to exemplify the
lyric addressed to capital itself, expressing its own unsuitability for the
task. Hayward reads in
Kevin Davies’ work a series of broken steps (gained through a pugilistic “combat
with its own vocabulary of despair”) which lead to “a precipice from which can
be observed in dark panorama the whole history of engaged art, from the period
of the bourgeois revolutions until the immediate aftermath of WWII, a whole
world, itself despairing, cut off from us, so that we stand before it at a
sheer ledge and know that we can reach it only by way of a jump.” These steps
and this ledge are the crystallisation of Hayward’s thinking of a
backwards-leap (actualising the merely backwards-looking anti-capitalist Romanticism theorised by Löwyand Sayre in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 2001). Hayward looks for a poetry positioned on the ledge, trying to work out where and how to
leap, and when. The “hotness and singularity” of these works sets them up as
personal records of the attempt to write the lyric of capital – records which
we can read and take back with us to the street where we look up at the lit
window to see if our desires can be obliterated and made anew.

What if, looking up at the
window, we found ourselves feeling the presence of other possible desires? And
this multiplicity helped us to reflect back more clearly on the desires we did
feel? The micro-history of the moment would be expanded, and the price of our
subjugation to fantasies might be lessened (is there any collective life which
doesn’t require a minimum of subjugation?). This would be my scenario for the
revision of formative contexts through a making present of denied possibilities,
but Hayward’s ‘Perfect Capitalism’ seeks to put these revisions into
circulation, pinning its hopes on an origin to come – a new dialectic in
language pointed towards nothing less than the out-stripping of credit capital.
In my view, Hayward is imagining poetry as a kind of anti-currency – a poem
could be a coin which destroyed all other coins it touched, reinstating
subjectivity (“hotness and singularity”) and social relations which are not
abstracted. Describing how this poem-currency would work in a final description
of his origin myth to come, Hayward argues for an increasing value of poetry which
would culminate when “fidelity to a life lived without the exchange of abstract
equivalents is audible even in the deepest, most perfect silence” – at which
point an echo would be heard.

To return to the simplest
starting point, Hayward’s critique is founded on Marx’s argument that crisis
exposes capital’s ideology: “In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities
and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute
contradiction.” (Capital, Vol 1, p
237, Penguin, 1976) Unlike the economic crises which have succeeded Marx’s
observation (after which depression follows and capital emerges to grow in a
new way, newly calibrated to changing conditions), the crisis which Hayward’s
modern Romanticism would hasten on towards would be a crisis of human
consciousness itself – and its contradiction would also be absolute. In the present moment, Hayward’s pragmatic strength is
that he thinks with money and follows it, theorizing a poetry which would work
as the very diagram of a counter-movement – one which would show the effacement
of itself as its strongest hope: money-capital’s purification of poetry.